OPed

[frame align=”left”]
[/frame]I have heard this many times “you are so lucky to have your music played by live musicians. That is my dream.”

During the recording of the score for “Primary”, my friend Brian Campbell ( recording engineer) said he understood why composers use samples rather than live players: perfect intonation, no microphone bleed, no noises from chairs, clothes, breathing, papers or noisy instruments etc…I will tell you now, luck has nothing to do with it.

Using live musicians is a lot more work. And costs money. And takes more time.

Low budget productions don’t even consider live players these days. When I offered it for “Primary” the answer was “really? We would love to but there is no money.” I explained the costs and options and it became a possibility. The director was on board and we made it happen we what we had. Same exact scenario on “Comforting Skin.”

But it wasn’t luck.

[list style=”green-bullet”]

I found viable options to make it happen in terms of players, engineer and studio space. I have built some great contacts here over the years, so it’s possible.

I sold the idea to the producer and he found a bit of extra money that I could budget with. The point is that most film makers want live music, it adds to the film; live is production value that goes on the screen.

It was low budget so I did all writing, orchestrating, part and score prep. So that was a ton of work that meant I had to work twice as much.

Using live musicians on a low budget means a lot of careful planning because of fewer options. More things to keep track and more can go wrong.

The reality is that using live musicians I sacrificed time and money. I could have kept more of the money and had less work.

[/list]

The other argument against live musician is a tight post production schedule, which happens a lot. I had to deliver an entire feature film score in a month, which is not the shortest schedule ever, but pretty short when doing it on your own. It broke down like this.

[list style=”green-bullet”]

Week 1: sketches and concepts for the score. Discuss with ¬†director and find direction. Choose instrumentation and start making phone calls.

Week 2-3: Write the score. Send mockups and get approved.

Week 4: Orchestrate. Score and part prep. Send MIDI/tempo map and time stamped pre-records to mixer to prep ProTools. (Note: I also had some orchestration work on a major feature during this time, so it was very busy and I had to pace myself ¬†well to make it all fit.)

Record score.

Week 5: edit and mix. Deliver.

[/list]

The bottom line is: You want live musicians? I know I do. So do it.

For me, having been writing for real musicians for so long, I can’t stand being limited by samples. I don’t want to¬†write down¬†to samples. ¬†There are many moments while recording “Primary” that it was clear why live was vastly superior to samples.

While I was in the studio, listening to my expressive cello lines and tender clarinet tunes coming¬†to life through great players, all the hard work was worth it. I did feel lucky then.

Alain
PS: A side benefit of stubbornly using live musicians on my own scores is that it led directly to my gig orchestrating on “Elysium” and “Ender’s Game”.

02Aug 2013

Welcome to Getting the Score

GTS is a blog about film scoring for composers and film makers who want to know how music can best serve a film.

With GTS you get everything the basics of spotting a film to the intricacies of film scoring that you will not see discussed anywhere else.

GTS is written by film composer and orchestrator Alain Mayrand.

NEVER MISS A POST!

Receive "Getting the Score" directly to your inbox for free and never miss a post!